All morning I’ve been thinking about the right subject for today’s blog post. Then I remembered that I still had some work to do on the website and I also have to finish the subscription form and popup for the visitors who want to subscribe to my newsletter. And then I thought: that’s it! Your own website and eMail list are very important and perhaps I should write a couple of words about that…
Why?
If you ask people who are “experienced” in this area to tell you which part of a musician’s online presence is the most important you will get a lot of different answers: from Instagram to Facebook, from Twitter to TikTok and back. Maybe a couple of them will say your own website and eMail list but that sounds so old school that you might not even listen to them. Well, if you ask me, that would be a big mistake!
Think about it: the only thing that’s really yours is everything you can save on your computer and/or hard disc. All the contacts, names, followers and fans that you have on Facebook, Instagram and other platforms can be gone tomorrow. Just google what happened to MySpace and you’ll see that even the biggest ones can crash. And when they do, they take all your data with them. They won’t let you know what’s going on so you can save everything you can from your account, no sir! And when the stuff is gone – it’s really gone! I know that some bands lost thousands and thousands of fan contacts at MySpace practically over night! And there was nothing to do about it…
So, just be careful and try to save everything important to your computer, just in case. Even better, collect the names and eMail addresses in your own eMail lists. This way you don’t depend on others.
How?
Well, the best and cheapest way is to do it yourself, of course. For instance, I made this website all by myself with WordPress and I’m very proud of it. IMHO it looks good, it’s functional and the only thing that costs me a bit of money is the webspace provider and that’s not even 10 $ a month! Yes, I had to learn how to design websites and it took me a couple of weeks to do so but on the other hand I could now design someone else’s website and earn some money on the side. Not bad, ha?
It’s similar with the eMail list. I decided to do my list on a platform called Mailchimp because up to 2000 subscribers are free of charge. Now remember, those are not your YouTube subscribers or Facebook followers which you don’t really know. You don’t have their names and you don’t have their eMail addresses. When someone subscribes on your website though, you get their name and their eMail. That’s something completely different. Why?
It’s direct and more personal
As a musician/artist/band you can communicate directly to your fans/subscribers. You get to know them, you can see which ones are “normal” average fans and which ones are so-called superfans who really love what you do and invest their time and even money in you. Of course, every fan is important but superans are your priority and you have to take a very good care of them. They could be the foundation of your life as a professional musician.
If you are a musician who, let’s say, is selling online courses you can directly contact and ask your subscribers what would they be interested in so you can make the right kind of courses which then also sell better and faster and your subscribers/customers get from you exactly the stuff that they want.
Of course you should be active on social media platforms, by all means! You should spread the word on them, share the information, interact with people, tell them what you do. But at the end, if they want the whole deal, they should go and visit your website, subscribe to it and then maybe you give them some kind of “thank you” present which they can’t get anywhere else. This way you got yourself a new fan, his name and eMail address and he/she is now proud to be an official part of your fanbase and even got the present. Everybody’s happy…
Backup is king
Now, don’t get me wrong: nothing is really safe until you do something about it and save it, not even your own website and eMail list. There’s a rule of saving the digital data to be on the safe side: you have to save it to at least 3 different places. The best combination would be something like your computer, an external hard drive and then some kind of cloud storage.
If you regularly backup your website and eMail list to all these places, you don’t have to worry if someday your webspace provider or Mailchimp are gone. If something like that should happen, you just take your backup, upload it to some other provider of your choice and you’re good to go! It’s all in your hands…
